Disability in Science Fiction Part 2
Okay, I decided to work on part 2 right after posting part 1 (like everyone else I know, I’m terribly sick with a cold and my brain isn’t working well enough to do academic work). You can read part 1 here.
For part 2, I give you another Varley story!
✿ “Blue Champagne” by John Varley (1981)
SYNOPSIS: Our protagonist Q.M. Cooper, a horny jock lifeguard at the “Bubble”—a giant gravityless pool in a luxury space station—pursues a relationship with Megan Galloway, a famous disabled media star who works for Feeliecorp producing experiential tapes.
OVERVIEW: Galloway wears a sidekick, a teched out exoskeleton, after a childhood spinal cord injury and both Galloway’s disability and her sidekick are vital to the plot. Since this is a novella, there’s really too much for me to get into, but I’ll quickly highlight some key things below. Spoilers ahead in case you want to read the story.
Galloway’s sidekick breaks down early on in the story—a nightmare for disabled people when their tech malfunctions. Stuck and waiting for the repairman, Cooper asks Galloway a lot of questions about her disability: “He simply knew nothing about her, and nothing about disability.” Galloway “un-techs” for the first time (i.e. her sidekick is removed) during the repair.
We later learn that Galloway’s rehab post-injury is recorded, or “transed,” by Feeliecorp. That is, the media conglomerate turns her vulnerable post-injury experiences into both trauma and inspiration porn. (Think of popular news coverage of disabled people learning how to walk again.) Megan shares these experiences with Cooper.
It’s revealed at the end of the story that Galloway does not own her sidekick, she leases it month-to-month at an enormous cost from a tech company. The cost of disability puts Galloway in a difficult position when the main romance plot comes to a head: “they threatened to take her body away.”
THEMES: disability and sexuality, celebrity, healthcare cost/medical debt, feeling and experience, disability and labour, technology as cure
OTHER NOTES: Megan Galloway reappears in Varley’s story "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo" (1985), now sans sidekick, having largely cured herself through new developments in medicine. (Galloway uses a “beautiful crystal cane” in the story, so I would still classify her as disabled.) She also appears to run and control her own media group.
RECOMMENDED PAIRED READING: Jillian Weise’s essay “Common Cyborg.”
cyborg concerns: Can I afford my leg? Will a stalker, a doctor or the law kill me?
Also, I want to quote Weise’s line about un-teching as a disabled woman, which Galloway rarely does in “Blue Champagne”:
I’m nervous at night when I take off my leg. I wait until the last moment before sleep to un-tech because I am a woman who lives alone and has been stalked, so I don’t feel safe in my home on crutches. How would I run? How would I fight back?